Efficient communication is an important and essential requirement for medical and healthcare professionals and the patients they treat. Quality communication between a patient and a healthcare professional helps ensure not only that a patient gets what they need, but also that they get what they need in an efficient manner and from the person best suited to fulfill that need. To that end, the healthcare field of today features a wide array of communications methods beyond the simple spoken and written word, including a variety of wired and wireless monitoring devices that use computers to automatically alert a healthcare professional as to the status of a patient. To this day, however, the call bell is perhaps the most recognizable and useful tool patients have for communicating with their care takers.
Currently, the call bell is typically a relatively small, hand-held device that has a single button on it. The patient can depress the button on the call bell to summon assistance from a health care professional. The healthcare professional responds to the call and determines what kind of assistance the patient requires. Upon determining what assistance the patient requires, the health care professional can assist the patient or contact another healthcare professional that is more capable of assisting the patient. This system, however, is inefficient as the patient only has one signaling option no matter what the specific need of the patient is or what specific healthcare professional would be best suited to assist the patient.
Therefore there is a need in the art for a need specific call bell system that offers a patient multiple selectable buttons that each correspond to a variety of specific needs and can likewise directly alert the healthcare professional best qualified to assist the patient with a given need. These and other features and advantages of the present invention will be explained and will become obvious to one skilled in the art through the summary of the invention that follows.